marco:

Jeff Atwood, in Trouble In the House of Google:

People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.

(via Anil Dash’s nice roundup…

Everybody’s had their chance to chime in on the SEO-hating and on Google becoming spammy and losing relevance, but just because an idea is vogue doesn’t mean it’s not right. What most people haven’t been talking about is who will replace them, or where the disruption will come from. That’s what I’m most curious about. My money is on Facebook and Twitter. While Twitter still apparently needs to sort out its existential confusion – are they an information network? are they creating a social graph? – it and Facebook are putting together a living, breathing, social data set that can serve as a powerful foundation for search. The notion of an algorithm that draws from the linkages across the internet was an extremely powerful one, but the notion of an algorithm that draws from the linkages between people is ever more so.

Marco.org: Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search